Funny looking glue on my PCB (and hello!)

[ianlogan123]

Hi there, my names Ian, and i'm from Aberdeen, UK.



Although not entirely new to stompbox building I've not done anything since I was at school 10 years ago. I have built a couple of guitars and did the wiring in those myself. I've become frustrated by the noise and sound of several of my boxes and I'm planning to tidy them up and mod them. I've used the search function on the forum and found plenty of useful information. The pedals are a BOSS GE-7 (which I mainly use for driving the preamp, but is hella hissy), a BOSS SD-1 (ditto, although I prefer the GE-7) and a BOSS DS-1 (which to be honest I dont' really use).

Rather than sell the pedals I don't use I thought I would mod them using these plans - http://www.robertkeeley.com/audio6l6/dstech.html and http://www.robertkeeley.com/audio6l6/sd1mods.html

I'll be sourcing the parts for this myself.

I'm not really sure what to do with the GE-7, and was either going to try putting in a sniper mod from tone-jam.com or Monte Allums' GE-7 mod. Does anyone have any preference for which of these to use. Would I be better just sourcing some new ICs and putting those in and chanigng all the capacitors and resistors to metal films? Do either of these kits change the value of the capacitors and resistors?

The search function didn't seem to answer the above question.

The last thing I was going to ask about was this funny looking glue that's on top of some of the components on the SD-1 (MIT). It seems to just keep the capacitors lying flat, but is that all? Anything else to it? Is there an easy way to remove it? I tried chipping away at it, but I'm a bit worried about damaging the components underneath.

Anyway, I'll let you know how I get on, and maybe try and get some clips up once things are done.

Ian.

[nelson]

Hi Welcome to the forum.

I am in Glasgow myself.

Just scrape the glue stuff off the board. It serves no purpose, dont have to take it off the components, just around them so they can be removed. I am not familiar with the mods for the GE-7, although I imagine that changing any capacitors would change the frequencies adjusted by the equalizer. Replacing the resistors with metal film will lower noise in the pedal. although I am not so sure its worth it, the noise source is most likely something else in your signal chain, just highlighted by boosting selected frequencies.

I would leave the GE-7 and work on the other pedals. Personally I wouldnt bother with kits.

You can get all the parts you will need from places like

www.rshelectronics.com

www.rapidelectronics.co.uk

www.maplin.co.uk

although for the cheap cheapy option you could always try

www.futurlec.com

had a few problems with them but they do their best to rectify them. Did I mention they are cheap?

Good luck and hope you find the tone your looking for.